iPhone Racer, Part 3

The time has come to start thinking about the technical details of the iPhone racing game. I like to attack my projects on multiple fronts from the get-go, as it gives me a sense of the overall architecture and requirements quickly.

Placeholders

This is probably not the right place to start, but I've created placeholders for the app icon and the loading screen. I would rather look at placeholders than the default white icon and black loading screen, given how many times you see the icon and loading screen during the development of an iPhone app. More importantly, I had fun doing it.

Game Framework

My iPhone game framework interface is heavily inspired by XNA and the game state XNA sample. Obviously, the implementation of the interface is completely different, but anyone who has ever used XNA would feel at home using my framework. However, I have not implemented anything similar to the content pipeline... yet.

The framework was/is implemented in a hybrid of Objective-C and C++, where Objective-C is really only used for Cocoa specific functionality and the fundamental app skeleton. The main reason for this decision is that I am hoping to be able to reuse some C++ code that I have written in the past for other platforms.

Graphics

I've decided to use 3D graphics and OpenGL is the obvious, not to mention only, choice for that purpose. Fortunately, I have previous experience with OpenGL, both from work and my own projects. The first time I used OpenGL was in 1998, on a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 GPU. Since then, OpenGL has come a long way. Still, I prefer Direct3D over OpenGL, but OpenGL will have to do.

When I did my master's thesis on terrain rendering, I started out in OpenGL, but I switched over to Direct3D very early on. Fortunately, my abstraction layer allowed me to completely replace the renderer in one single day. It would probably be a good idea to create a similar abstraction for this project, even if OpenGL is the only option on the iPhone.

Audio

When it comes to audio, I will go with OpenAL. I have already written a very, very basic implementation of an OpenAL audio engine. I will build on that to create something that is actually usable in a game.

Comments: 0 Tags: game, iPhone, OpenAL, OpenGL